Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 3.pdf/362

 futurity may be miscalculated, but the world unhesitatingly owns that he is coming, and will at last be here. In almost every other particular the fortunes of man may differ; but to die is common to all. The stream of life runs into a thousand various channels; but run where it will, brightly or darkly, smoothly or languidly, it is stopped by death.

Every successive generation death claims for his own, and his claim is never denied. To die is the condition on which we hold life. Rebellion sickens with hope lessness at the thought of resisting death: the very hope of the most desperate is, not that death may be escaped, but that he is external; and all that the young, the careless, and the dissipated attempt, is to think of death as seldom as possible. No man, therefore, will deny, that whatever can be said of death is applicable to himself. The bell that he hears tolled may never toll for him; there may be no friend or children left to lament him; he may not have to lie through long and anxious days, looking for the coming of the anticipated hour; but he knows that he must die; he knows that, in whatsoever quarter of the world he abides, whatever be his circumstances, however strong his hold of life, however unlike the prey of death he looks, however careful of his health, and temperate in all his habits he may be, that "it is appointed unto all men once to die, and after death the judgment."

And it is the judgment that is the principal thing